UNLV Transit Hub Study Part 1

There’s no question that a lot of people live and work around UNLV. Looking at the numbers of the RTC’s study, without a doubt this is a busy core. And it’s not just people driving around, it’s also people walking around, biking around, and getting off in front of the university.

Students commuting to UNLV tend to live to the southeast stretching out to the 215 South. It’s a wonder then why there hasn’t been more development transportation wise in this direction. There is 200 space Park & Ride lot just south of the airport, but that’s already within five miles of the university. And we all know how long it takes the buses to travel five miles (link).

Those are all interesting facts, but the success of the proposed Transit Hub, wherever it shall fall, is the implementation of the Maryland Parkway BRT plus other Park & Ride facilities in the southeast. In another study, the Mission Group proposed this layout for the BRT and Park & Ride facilities (from the Fixed-Guideway Transit for the Las Vegas Region Presentation) :

ACE BRT plan

(Interestingly, this study recommended a light rail system but the RTC went with bus rapid transit instead because of price concerns. For an awesome analysis of BRT versus Light Rail, see Yuri Popov’s, physics professor at University of Michigan, post.)

And of course, the success of both the Transit Hub and BRT line depend upon a revitalization of the corridor – i.e. Midtown UNLV. But with the dissolution of the Clark County Redevelopment Agency, everything is very much up in the air.

The next stop is the Maryland Parkway BRT study. Please forgive the delays, but you see, I am but one person reading through thousands of pages.

Yes, comrades, there was once upon a time a plan to develop the area around UNLV to be more friendly to students’ feet. That project was called Midtown UNLV.

I found this out today while lunching with some hip planners from the City of Las Vegas. But some stuff didn’t go through, and that’s what I’m working on finding out.

There isn’t much on their site – just some drawups of the Greenspun Hall and the new student union. Here is the link anway: Midtown UNLV

Yeah, it stings.

That’s the word from PIO Tracy Bower at RTC.

There are plans in the works for ACE Downtown Connector and ACE Express, which has three stops at Durano & US 95, the downtown transportation center, then possibly UNLV,  to connect to the city’s university. With the completion of two studes – UNLV intermodal transit hub and the Maryland Parkway ACE study – it sounds like Clark County is seriously thinking about serving the community and not just the toursists.

I haven’t gotten a hold of either studies yet, the PIOs at RTC are saying they’ll be out soon.

Went around the Maryland Parkway corridor in front of UNLV Sunday, to see what there is to see. What I saw was parking lots! And a new parking garage! Here is the front of the school:

And the new garage:

Peachy keen, the first thing people notice about the university is the impenetrable gravel and concrete moat.

A 2007 survey asked students about parking – only a handful mentioned better alternative transportation. But the questions were very much skewed to get student thinking about how bad parking is.

Instead of asking – how would you PREFER to get to school or WHERE on campus do you frequent the most, they asked “Where would you like better parking?”

The numbers are also highly skewed towards faculty and staff – about 53% faculty and staff in the study. Um, hello? There are almost 27,000 students and only 46% of the respondents were students?

My conclusion – we can’t do anything with this study. The information gleaned can only be used to address faculty and staff parking needs. The university can’t make adequate decisions about parking and transportation policy unless a better sampling is taken.

Secondly – does the university really want to be encased in parking garages and lots? To the outsider, it doesn’t look so much like a university so much as a strip mall. Take a look at this screen shot from a map done by Mark Skinner called Walkable UNLV. Notice all those “P”s for Parking? And that’s not even all of them!

Update: From Allison Blankenship, PIO:

The RTC’s UNLV Multi-Modal Transit Hub Feasibility Study is near completion and we expect the study findings to be presented to the RTC Board in the next month or so. At this point, funding for the project is not secured.

Board meetings are on the second Thursday of the month at 8:45 a.m. Please attend if you think this study is important. I’ll be sending out reminders on here and via Facebook. Friend us to keep apprised of the situation.

Many local public institutions suffer from lack of visibility. It may, in small part, be due to lack of will to really inform. Or lack of people to inform. Or it may be that all the news happens in committee meetings and not on Facebook. Whatever it is, I’m starting up a new series “Stuff No One Really Advertises” to expose those things which go completely under the radar of the UNLV community, of course with the bent on mobility and livable streets (someone help me find a sexier name for this?).

Today, while doing some shallow digging on RTC’s website, I found a study done in March 2008 on possible transit hubs around campus.

Yes, UNLV and RTC want(ed?) to partner up to give students, faculty and staff better access to buses, bike paths, pedestrian walkways and car traffic. I don’t know about the last one because it seems to be in total contradiction to the other three, but ok.

There are five “alternate sites” where this could happen, in which I respond – why not build all five? These are indicated in two maps showing where some bus stops could be placed.

Stop #1: By the Red Lot, home of the soon to be built parking garage in front of Thomas and Mack.
Stop #2: By the bookstore, urban affairs college and student union.
Stop #3: White Lot, or as students like it call it BFE.
Stop #4: Free lot, again BFE.
Stop #5: UNLV entrance (where Frazier hall used to be) and Ham Fine Arts.

Here’s a map to help you visualize, click on the highlighted areas to get more information:

View Transit Hubs around UNLV? in a larger map
(For some reason its showing the entire US. Please keep zooming in.)

What became of this, I can only assume is another study – the Maryland Parkway corridor study which is evaluating the street for a possible bus rapid transit line.

What will happen to UNLV as a transit hub, though?

I’m heading down to UNLV on Saturday morning to take photos of the streets surrounding the university for a photoshop project I’m working on similar to Good.is’s Livable Streets challenge.

If you have photos of your own, please submit them via email (akgobrien at gmail dot com) or add them our Flickr group.

If you photoshopped it already, even better because we can feature it in a post!

Cheers

It’s been awhile, but I’ve been working hard to consolidate a bunch of information for you all. Here are some motion charts, just because I’m in a motion chart mood, of bus ridership and traffic accidents around the UNLV campus.

Here is a chart showing the ridership increase from 2004 to 2008 on the three bus lines surrounding the university. Just hit play!

(Change the color, size, x and y axes!)

Although ridership has increased, it’s also important to note that the population has increased too. What I’m hoping to do over the summer is do a “deep dive” into the transportation habits of the Maryland Parkway community (please don’t doubt that there is one). I’ll be looking more closely at how students, faculty and staff at UNLV use the bus (if at all).

This chart of traffic accidents from 2004-2008 at five intersections surrounding UNLV comes after serious re-engineering. There was a lot of data and my computer screen is tiny!

There are a lot of variables to play with here. I suggest playing with it to glean the info you want. You change the color of the bubbles, the size of the bubbles, and the x and y axes. The variables are: number of accidents, vehicles involved, fatalities and injuries.

Tell me what interesting things you discover in the comments!

The center of any city is its downtown. Unfortunately for Las Vegas, that downtown is littered with tourists who really don’t care about the Vegas community.

UNLV is a prime target to start growing a more connected city.

The people at the university’s parking services department have been almost irreversibly stigmatized because the student newspaper, The Rebel Yell, attacks them  repeatedly for the of lack of parking spaces.

More parking spaces means more cars, more cars means more gas burning, and more gas burning means terrible air quality and longer, hotter, drier summers.

But let’s not focus on parking, let’s focus on buses.

What would happen then if students were to actually take the bus to school? What would happen if the apartments in the surrounding area were dominated by students? It would create a chain reaction.

More bus lanes, better access and even university run shuttles to neighborhoods within a 2 mile radius could ease up the need for parking, create a real downtown feel and, of course, make UNLV green.

Right now, RTC is conducting a corridor study of Maryland Parkway that could better serve the area by adding a bus-only lane. It’s a fantastic idea. Tracy Bower, public information officer for RTC, said they were working with the university on the study.

I am waiting for Tad McDowell at UNLV’s Parking Services to return a call so we can begin the discussion.

Is there no one out there who does know?

This past week I’ve been trying to get someone in UNLV’s Civil and Environmental Engineering program to help answer my question: how should RTC spend the stimulus money to improve Las Vegas’s transit problems?

So far, only three have gotten back to me and but no one has any insight.

I emailed Dr. Edward Neuman who specializes in transportation with the engineering department. He said he hadn’t worked with RTC in several years and therefore didn’t have an informed opinion.

Dr. Hualing Teng said he was too busy working on other projects to answer a single question by email or phone.

Dr. Nader Ghafoori, the chair of Civil Engineering, said Dr. Neuman would be the best person to talk to. I guess he didn’t get the memo that Dr. Neuman actually wasn’t.

If we can’t rely on the so-called experts in transportation working at a public university in the city where the problems exist – then who can we rely on?